In field battles, the barrels of guns may be the most important parts determining the performance of the guns and thus should be kept clean for any shooting. In general, a gun weapon system includes howitzers, direct-firing guns, tank guns, antiaircraft guns, and mortars each having an appropriate barrel. If a gun is fired in a state where the barrel of the gun is not clean, fatal problems such as barrel bursting may occur as well as the velocity and range of bombs being affected. In addition, if a gun is left for a long tie without cleaning after firing, the inside of the barrel may rust because of remaining gunpowder or soot.
Although gun weapon systems have been significantly developed owing to the advance in scientific technology, the development of techniques or methods for cleaning gun barrels has not kept pace with the development of gun weapon systems, and thus soldiers have to manually clean gun barrels by attaching a brush to a cleaning rod shaped like a long pole, inserting the cleaning rod into the bore of a barrel, and repeatedly pulling and pushing the cleaning rod in the bore. When cleaning the inside of a gun barrel, a strong frictional force acts between the brush and the rifling on the bore of the gun barrel, and thus the cleaning rod has to be moved against the frictional force which increases the manpower and time necessary for cleaning the gun barrel. For example, seven to twelve soldiers have to work hard for an hour or more to clean the barrel bore of a large-caliber self-propelled gun.
Techniques for solving the above-mentioned problems by efficiently cleaning the bore of a gun barrel with less manpower in shorter time are disclosed in patent applications and issued patents: power devices for automatically cleaning a gun barrel are disclosed in Literatures 1 and 2, and a semiautomatic device for cleaning a gun barrel using a winch is disclosed in Literature 3. The disclosed techniques are considered efficient for cleaning a gun barrel. However, the functions of existing cleaning rods and brushes cannot be fully replaced with such automatic and semiautomatic gun barrel cleaning devices, and thus the existing gun barrel cleaning systems should be used although such new gun barrel cleaning devices are added to respective guns. That is, such an automatic gun barrel cleaning device or a semiautomatic gun barrel cleaning device using a winch cannot be used to efficiently clean the breeches of guns although being used to efficiently clean the rifling on rifled barrels or portions of unrifled barrel through which warheads move. In addition, to remove defective ammunition from the breech, a defective ammunition removing tool has to be attached to a cleaning rod to beat the detective ammunition out of the breech, and thus cleaning rods and brushes are still necessary.
Furthermore, the above-described automatic and semiautomatic gun barrel cleaning devices can be used only for guns of 105 mm or greater calibers. That is, it is impossible or difficult to use such automatic and semiautomatic gun barrel cleaning devices for guns of smaller calibers.
Therefore, there is a need for a method of efficiently cleaning bores of various gun barrels with less manpower in shorter time by using the existing cleaning system including a cleaning rod used for cleaning gun bores, removing defective ammunition, etc.
The barrel bores of small-caliber guns are cleaned using cleaning cloth inserted into a hole formed in an end of a slender rod (cleaning rod). Although the barrel bores of small-caliber guns can be cleaned more efficiently by pushing and pulling stiff brushes such as brass, hog bristle, mane, or stainless brushes in the barrel bores one to five times, it is difficult for a soldier to move such a stiff brush back and forth in the barrel bore. Furthermore, since a slender rod to which cleaning cloth is attached is not tightly inserted in a barrel bore, the slender rod has to be moved back and force in the barrel bore too many times, which abrades the rifling on the barrel bore and thus reduces the lifespan of the barrel.    [Literature 1] Korean Patent Application Publication No.: 10-1998-0055121    [Literature 2] Korean Patent Application Publication No.: 10-2006-0098356    [Literature 3] Korean Patent Registration No.: 0963166